Former St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Rubén Rosario, a tireless advocate for the powerless, grew up in the Bronx and earned his journalism stripes working at the New York Daily News. Rosario – who moved to Minnesota in 1991 and worked at the Pioneer Press for almost 30 years – died Wednesday at the M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis from complications related to multiple myeloma. He was 70, the Pioneer Press reports. Rosario was a founding member of Criminal Justice Journalists, publisher of this news digest. He was “a real journalist – a shoe-leather, go-to-the-scene, get-on-the-phone, ask-the-questions, check-it-out journalist,” said Mike Burbach, the editor of the Pioneer Press and a longtime friend. “He had plenty of opinions, as a columnist should, but he was a journalist first.”
Rosario specialized in writing about public-safety issues and covered some of the most notorious crime cases in New York City and Minnesota, including high-profile organized-crime trials, subway gunman Bernard Goetz, the Etan Patz disappearance, the Central Park jogger murder and controversial police shootings. He once went undercover inside a drug den, smoked crack and wrote a front-page, first-person account of a drug that was devastating Harlem and other poor, inner-city neighborhoods during the mid-1980s. “His sense of justice came through in everything he did,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, who got to know Rosario when he was a prosecutor in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. “My rule was if Rubén wanted to interview me or talk to me, I always did it. I admired his hard-hitting, get-to-the-bottom-line approach. There were no frills and no nonsense. Every single interaction I had with him was rewarding.” Rosario believed that the “time-honored purpose of journalism was to ‘Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable,’” said Laura Rosario, his wife of 46 years. “He always wanted to make right what was wrong.”